Why my daughter quit teaching at any school

If children are the future, public education nourishes hope. It’s the great social equalizer, because it identifies and rewards each child’s potential and ambition.

Or it was circa 1970. Today, Florida’s schools destroy hope teacher by teacher. Their recent loss: my 30-year-old daughter.

Most Americans (75 percent) don’t believe they have political influence (July AP-NORC poll). As a result, we view schools as “them” rather than “us.” But public means just that — working together to teach our young. We do it so our kids have decent lives; but more importantly, we do it so our society and ideals thrive in the generations ahead.

My daughter, Jordan, graduated from Jacksonville University with a master’s degree and overly optimistic drive to make children’s lives better. Her first job at a Jacksonville private school gave her that opportunity. It was true teaching. Most of her students were at-risk — or, in public-school vernacular, ones “who might do better in a different environment” — with tuition paid through McKay Scholarship tax money. (The send-them-away tactic also boosts public schools’ test scores.)

What Jordan didn’t love: Private-school owners make more money if they cut expenses, and while public schools don’t have money, private schools don’t want to spend money. Income-wise, she made thousands of dollars less and had no health insurance, but she made a difference in children’s lives.

Three years later, Duval County Public Schools hired Jordan because, career-wise, it made sense. She got health care. She made more money. It was normal — the thing graduates do with a teaching degree. But the rules, the tests and the culture frustrated her. Her focus turned from the kids to the system. When she told other teachers she was getting out, they universally said: “Oh, no, that’s such a shame … but I understand.”

Public-school teaching today is a one-size-fits-all assembly line with rules often created by lawmakers who can’t, or won’t, see the big picture. Long-term teachers survive by turning a blind eye to crazy rules, keeping their heads down and treating teaching as the job it is. There’s little wiggle room for innovative techniques or get-down-on-one-knee, heart-to-heart conversations, which, ironically, make us dislike our public schools even more.

We can’t create draconian rules for public schools and then water them down a bit for charter schools or drown them completely for private schools. And if we do, we can’t use that as proof that public schools are inferior. In many nonprofit companies, incompetence runs rampant, just as it does in some private firms and government agencies. At least for the government, we can identify problems and demand solutions — and if we can’t, the problem is bigger than public-school performance. You can’t handcuff a fighter’s hands and expect him to win a bout with an unchained opponent.

Education, not presidents, makes America great again.